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Mastering the Business of Medicine by Sharla A. Paul 
Dietz Fund winners The competition's '98 results BBA placement Quality of placement for undergraduates is on the rise Gifts and Grants News Two new scholarships have been established 
Alumni technology club '98MBAs launch networking and educational group Global partners Goizueta hosts seventeen institutions for a conference on international partnerships 
Lisa Holsclaw '81BBA  From cashier to VP at Kroger Cliff Oxford '94EMBA The help-desk helper |
From MD to MBA: The Next Step in Patient Care? by Faye Goolrick To doctors who have completed the rigorous and time-consuming education and training process, the idea of pursuing an MBA degree might seem like a daunting career redirection. Not necessarily, say physician-graduates of Goizueta Business School. On the contrary, a business degree can help practicing physicians and physician-administrators deliver better patient care. "I started my MBA in 1992, when we all knew that
A career pediatric emergency/critical-care physician and anesthesiologist with extensive administrative experience, Wright was named medical director of Egleston Children's Hospital of Emory University and vice president for medical management for the Egleston system immediately after completing her MBA. Over the past five years, Wright has seen major changes in children's health-care delivery in the Atlanta area, exemplified in part by the merger of Egleston and Scottish Rite Children's Medical Center into one business entity. At the same time, managed care companies have wielded ever-growing influence over health-care decisions, and treatment providers increasingly have relied on income from federal and state-run programs such as Medicaid and Georgia's new PeachCare. "In business school, my classmates were from BellSouth, Southern Company, and Georgia-Pacific. From them I learned some new ways of thinking about working in a regulated industry," she says. "My classmates taught me that sometimes it's appropriate to go out and start trying to change the rules. The creation of PeachCare is a good example of how medical professionals and legislators were able to help children by changing the rules." For Michael E. Bernardino '96EMBA, vice president for health affairs at the University of Buffalo, enrolling in business school was a personal challenge as well as a career opportunity. When Bernardino began the EMBA program, he was director of managed care within the Emory Healthcare system and had already made a name for himself as a professor of radiology and the author of some two hundred medical journal articles. But he knew that if he wanted to stay in medical administration, he would have to "move beyond the dilettante stage, roll up my sleeves, and devote a certain amount of concentration to being a successful administrator." The first day of business school almost changed his mind. "It reminded me of my first day as a medical intern, when I was on call for twenty-four hours," he says. "I just hated it. In both those situations, I remember thinking, 'What in the world have I got myself into? How am I going to do this for a whole year?' " Even for a physician accustomed to stress and long hours, the pace was grueling. "But there were certain core values I learned, the rudiments of strategic planning, a different type of knowledge," Bernardino says. "And my classmates kept me going. We had an extremely intelligent, tough class, with people from Coke, UPS, IBM, Monsanto, BellSouth, Anheuser Busch. Overall, I learned more from my classmates than I did from my studies." Bernardino continues to use those business insights from fellow EMBA students while overseeing a $350 million business consisting of the five health-sciences schools (medical, dental, nursing, pharmacy, and allied health) of the State University of New York at Buffalo. In his view, being an administrator in academic medicine is more challenging than anything he's done thus far.
Another recent physician graduate, Ira J. Isaacson '96EMBA, took a different path after finishing his degree. An anesthesiologist and the associate director and chief operating officer of the Emory Clinic during his time in business school, Isaacson used his MBA as a springboard into consulting for Egon Zehnder International, where he recruits senior executives for health-care facilities worldwide. "It's not as dramatic a switch as one might think, because I was already in a full-time administrative leadership role in a multispecialty clinic with twenty-eight hundred employees and $240 million in revenues," Isaacson says. "My operational responsibilities included human resources, and I was very familiar with both the financial and the human capital required by successful health-care provider organizations." Spurred in part by a growing sense that health care was unnecessarily behind the times in such areas as information technology and human resources management, Isaacson and his wife, Jane Duggan '96EMBA (also an anesthesiologist), enrolled in business school determined to catch up with what he describes as "a whole new world of sophisticated ways to improve patient care and service." Isaacson finished the program not with the deliberate notion of leaving medicine, but with a discomfiting feeling that, in many ways, he had already left. When he began talking to Egon Zehnder, he discovered that there are, quite literally, only a handful of experienced, physician-trained, MBA-degreed senior-executive recruiters in the world. "What I'm doing today is different, of course-I've traded the white coat for a suit coat-but it's very valuable for the future of health care," he says. "Whether they are in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, or medical provider systems, the people we're looking for are the people who are going to make a difference, ultimately, in patient care. |
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